Part 6 (2/2)

I. _The Theoretical Process of Religious Culture._

-- 155. Religion, in common with every content of the spirit, must pa.s.s through three stages of feeling, conception, and comprehension. Whatever may be the special character of any religion it cannot avoid this psychological necessity, either in its general history or in the history of the individual consciousness. The teacher must understand this process, partly in order that he may make it easier to the youth, partly that he may guard against the malformation of the religious feeling which may arise through the fact of the youth's remaining in one stage after he is ready for another and needs it. Pedagogics must therefore lay out beforehand the philosophy of religion, on which alone can be found the complete discussion of this idea.

-- 156. (1) Religion exists first as religious feeling. The person is still immediately identical with the Divine, does not yet distinguish himself from the absoluteness of his being, and is in so far determined by it. In so far as he feels the divine, he is a mystery to himself.

This beginning is necessary. Religion cannot be produced in men from the external side; its genesis belongs rather to the primitive depths in which G.o.d himself and the individual soul are essentially one.

--The educator must not allow himself to suppose that he is able to make a religion. Religion dwells originally in every individual soul, for every one is born of G.o.d. Education can only aid the religious feeling in its development. As far as regards the psychological form, it was quite correct for Schleiermacher and his followers to characterize the absoluteness of the religious feeling as the feeling of dependence, for feeling is determined by that which it feels; it depends upon its content. But in so far as G.o.d const.i.tutes the content of the feeling, there appears the opposite of all dependence or absolute emanc.i.p.ation. I maintain this in opposition to Schleiermacher. Religion lifts man above the finite, temporal and transitory, and frees him from the control of the phenomenal world. Even the lowest form of religion does this; and when it is said that Schleiermacher has been unjustly criticized for this expression of dependence, this distinction is overlooked.--

-- 157. But religious feeling as such rises into something higher when the spirit distinguishes the content of this religious feeling from any other content which it also feels, represents it clearly to itself, and places itself over against it formally as a free individual.

--But we must not understand that the religious feeling is destroyed in this process; in rising to the form of distinct representation, it remains at the same time as a necessary form of the Intelligence.--

-- 158. If the spirit is held back and prevented from pa.s.sing out of the simplicity of feeling into the act of distinguis.h.i.+ng the perception from what it becomes, the conception--if its efforts towards the forming of this conception are continually re-dissolved into feeling, then feeling, which was as the first step perfectly healthy and correct, will become morbid and degenerate into a wretched mysticism. Education must, therefore, make sure that this feeling is not destroyed by the progress of its content into perception and conception on the side of psychological form, but rather that it attains truth thereby.

-- 159. (2) Conception as the ideally transformed perception dissects the religious content on its different sides, and follows each of these to its consequence. Imagination controls the individual conceptions, but by no means with that absoluteness which is often supposed; for each picture has in itself its logical consequence to which imagination must yield; e.g. if a religion represents G.o.d as an animal, or as half animal and half man, or as man, each of these conceptions has in its development its consequences for the imagination.

-- 160. We rise out of the stage of Conception when the spirit tries to determine the universality of its content according to its necessity, i.e. when it begins to think. The necessity of its pictures is a mere presupposition for the imagination. The thinking activity, however, recognizes not only the contradiction which exists between the sensuous, limited form of the individual conception, and the absolute nature of its content, but also the contradiction in which the conceptions find themselves with respect to each other.

-- 161. If the spirit is prevented from pa.s.sing out of the varied pictures of conception to the supersensuous clearness and simplicity of the thinking activity--if the content which it already begins to seize as idea is again dissolved into the confusion of the picture-world, then the religion of imagination, which was a perfectly proper form as the second step, becomes perverted into some form of idolatry, either coa.r.s.e or refined. Education must therefore not oppose the thinking activity if the latter undertakes to criticize religious conceptions; on the contrary, it must guide this so that the discovery of the contradictions which unavoidably adhere to sensuous form shall not mislead the youth into the folly of throwing away, with the relative untruth of the form, also the religious content in general.

--It is an error for educators to desire to keep the imagination apart from religious feeling, but it is also an error to detain the mind, which is on its formal side the activity of knowing, in the stage of imagination, and to desire to condemn it thence into the service of canonical allegories. The more, in opposition to this, it is possessed with the charm of thinking, the more is it in danger of condemning the content of religion itself as a mere fict.i.tious conception. As a transition-stage the religion of imagination is perfectly normal, and it does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion.

The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it were a mere conception.--

-- 162. (3) In the thinking activity the spirit attains that form of the religious content which is identical with that of its simple consciousness, and above which there is no other for the intelligence as theoretical. But we distinguish three varieties in this thinking activity: the abstract, the reflective, and the speculative. The Abstract gives us the religious content of consciousness in the form of abstractions or dogmas, i.e. propositions which set up a definition as a universal, and add to it another as the reason for its necessity. The Reflective stage busies itself with the relation of dogmas to each other, and with the search for the grounds on which their necessity must rest. It is essentially critical, and hence skeptical. The explanation of the dogmas, which is carried on in this process of reasoning and skeptical investigation, is completed alone in speculative thinking, which recognizes the free unity of the content and its form as its own proper self-determination of the content, creating its own differences.

Education must know this stage of the intelligence, partly that it may in advance preserve, in the midst of its changes, that repose which it brings into the consciousness; partly that it may be able to lead to the process of change itself, in accordance with the organic connection of its phases. We should prevent the criticism of the abstract understanding by the reflective stage as little as we should that of the imagination by the thinking activity. But the stage of reflection is not the last possibility of the thinking activity, although, in the variety of its skepticism it often takes itself for such, and, with the emptiness of mere negation to which it holds, often brings itself forward into undesirable prominence. It becomes evident, in this view, how very necessary for man, with respect to religion, is a genuine philosophical culture, so that he may not lose the certainty of the existence of the Absolute in the midst of the obstinacy of dogmas and the changes of opinions.

-- 163. Education must then not fear the descent into dogmatic abstraction, since this is an indispensable means for theoretical culture in its totality, and the consciousness cannot dispense with it in its history. But Education has, in the concrete, carefully to discern in which of these stages of culture any particular consciousness may be.

For if for mankind as a race the fostering of philosophy is absolutely necessary, it by no means follows that this necessity exists for each individual. To children, to women, e.g. for all kinds of simple and limited lives, the form of the religion of the imagination is well suited, and the form of comprehension can come only relatively to them.

Education must not, then, desire powerfully and prematurely to develop the thinking activity before the intelligence is really fully grown.

--The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher, appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension, can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the superficiality of psychological inquiry.--

-- 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-a.s.sured insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations.

This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already existent.

--External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.--

II. _The Practical Process of Religious Culture._

-- 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him.

But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1) consecration--religious feeling in general,--(2) the induction of the youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation with his lot.

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